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2706 books match the query 'European' and 82 start with e

cover of Eardrums: Literary Modernism as Sonic Warfare

Eardrums

Literary Modernism as Sonic Warfare

Tyler Whitney

Northwestern University Press, 2019

In this innovative study, Tyler Whitney demonstrates how a transformation and militarization of the civilian soundscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries left indelible traces on the literature that defined the period. Both formally and thematically, the modernist aesthetics of Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Detlev von Liliencron, and Peter Altenberg drew on this blurring of martial and civilian soundscapes in traumatic and performative repetitions of war. At the same time, Richard Huelsenbeck assaulted audiences in Zurich with his “sound poems,” which combined references to World War I, colonialism, and violent encounters in urban spaces with nonsensical utterances and linguistic detritus—all accompanied by the relentless beating of a drum on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire.

Eardrums is the first book-length study to explore the relationship between acoustical modernity and German modernism, charting a literary and cultural history written in and around the eardrum. The result is not only a new way of understanding the sonic impulses behind key literary texts from the period. It also outlines an entirely new approach to the study of literature as as the interaction of text and sonic practice, voice and noise, which will be of interest to scholars across literary studies, media theory, sound studies, and the history of science.
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cover of Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices

Early Modern Autobiography

Theories, Genres, Practices

Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis and Philippa Kelly, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2006

Why, and in what ways, did late medieval and early modern English people write about themselves, and what was their understanding of how "selves" were made and discussed? This collection goes to the heart of current debate about literature and autobiography, addressing the contentious issues of what is meant by early modern autobiographical writing, how it was done, and what was understood by self-representation in a society whose groupings were both elaborate and highly regulated. Early Modern Autobiography considers the many ways in which autobiographical selves emerged from the late medieval period through the seventeenth century, with the aim of understanding the interaction between those individuals’ lives and their worlds, the ways in which they could be recorded, and the contexts in which they are read. In addressing this historical arc, the volume develops new readings of significant autobiographical works, while also suggesting the importance of texts and contexts that have rarely been analyzed in detail, enabling the contributors to reflect on, and challenge, some prevailing ideas about what it means to write autobiographically and about the development of notions of self-representation.

“The idea of the self, as seen from diverse and fascinating perspectives on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century life: this is what readers can expect from Early Modern Autobiography. A beautifully edited collection, genuinely far-reaching and insightful, Early Modern Autobiography makes known to us a great deal about how people saw themselves four hundred years ago."
—Derek Cohen, Professor of English, McLaughlin College, York University

"Acutely addressing a range of central issues from subjectivity to theatricality to religion, these essays will be of great interest to specialists in early modern studies and students of autobiographical writings from all eras."
—Heather Dubrow, Tighe-Evans Professor and John Bascom Professor, Department of English, University of Wisconsin

"The essays in this volume show where archival discoveries—memoirs, letters, account books, wills, and marginalia—can take us in understanding early modern mentalities. They document the interdependence of the abstract and the everyday, the social constructedness of self-awareness, local contexts for self-recordation, and impulses that range from legal purpose to imaginative escape. The sixteen chapters open many fascinating new perspectives on identity and personhood in Renaissance England."—Lena Cowen Orlin, Executive Director, The Shakespeare Association of America and Professor of English, University of Maryland Baltimore County
Ronald Bedford is Reader in the School of English, Communication and Theatre at the Unversity of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, and author of The Defence of Truth: Herbert of Cherbury and the Seventeenth Century and Dialogues with Convention: Readings in Renaissance Poetry. The late Lloyd Davis was Reader in the School of English at the University of Queensland, and author of Guise and Disguise: Rhetoric and Characterization in the English Renaissance (1993) and editor of Sexuality and Gender in the English Renaissance (1998) and Shakespeare Matters: History, Teaching, Performance (2003). Philippa Kelly is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales, and has published widely in the areas of Shakespeare studies, cultural studies, feminism, and postcolonial studies.
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cover of Early Modern Women's Writing and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

Early Modern Women's Writing and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

Stephanie Merrim

Vanderbilt University Press, 1999

This book maps the field of seventeenth-century women's writing in Spanish, English, and French and situates the work of Sor Juana more clearly within that field. It holds up the multi-layered, proto-feminist writings of Sor Juana as a meaningful lens through which to focus the literary production of her female contemporaries. Merrim's book advances the integration of Hispanic women authors and women's issues into the panorama of early modern women's writing and opens up unexplored commonalities between Sor Juana and her sister writers.

Early modern women writers whose works are explored include Marie de Gournay, Margaret Fell Fox, Catalina de Erauso, Maria de Zayas, Ana Caro, Mme de Lafayette, Anne Bradstreet, St. Teresa, and Margaret Lucas Cavendish.

Merrim's study provides a full-bodied picture of the resources that the cultural and historical climates of the seventeenth century placed at the disposal of women writers, the manners in which women writers instrumentalized them, the building blocks and concerns of early modern women's writing, and the continuities between early modern and modern women's writing.

Written in an engaging, clear manner, this innovative study will be of interest not only to Hispanists but also to scholars in early modern studies, women's studies, history, and comparative literature.

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cover of Early Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert

Early Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert

Jaroslav Seifert

Northwestern University Press, 1997

Nobel Prize winner Jaroslav Seifert's poetry is strongly situated within the Czech literary tradition of Poetism, which evolved into a playful, light-hearted refuge from world history while maintaining an edge of social consciousness. Called "a living symbol of the continuity in modern Czech literature" by Václav Havel, Seifert remains a towering figure in European poetry more than a decade after his death.
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cover of East Asian Aesthetics and the Space of Painting in Eighteenth-Century Europe

East Asian Aesthetics and the Space of Painting in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Isabelle Tillerot

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2024

An insightful look at how East Asian notions of space transformed Western painting.

This volume offers the first critical account of how European imports of East Asian textiles, porcelain, and lacquers, along with newly published descriptions of the Chinese garden, inspired a revolution in the role of painting in early modern Europe. With particular focus on French interiors, Isabelle Tillerot reveals how a European enthusiasm for East Asian culture and a demand for novelty transformed the dynamic between painting and decor. Models of space, landscape, and horizon, as shown in Chinese and Japanese objects and their ornamentation, disrupted prevailing design concepts in Europe. With paintings no longer functioning as pictorial windows, they began to be viewed as discrete images displayed on a wall—and with that, their status changed from decorative device to autonomous work of art.

This study presents a detailed history of this transformation, revealing how an aesthetic free from the constraints of symmetry and geometrized order upended paradigms of display, enabling European painting to come into its own.
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cover of Echoes of Women's Voices: Music, Art, and Female Patronage in Early Modern Florence

Echoes of Women's Voices

Music, Art, and Female Patronage in Early Modern Florence

Kelley Harness

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Aristocratic women exerted unprecedented political and social influence in Florence throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. During this period, female members of the powerful Medici family governed the city for the first and only time in its history. These women also helped shape the city's artistic life, commissioning works of music, art, and theater that were inscribed with their own concerns and aspirations. Echoes of Women's Voices examines the patronage of individuals and institutions, particularly convents, which have remained, until now, largely neglected by scholars.

Through commissions, patrons sought to promote a vision of the world and their place in it. The unique social norms, laws, educational backgrounds, and life experiences of female patrons meant the expression of a worldview that differed significantly from that of their male counterparts. Joining exceptional archival research with telling analysis of significant examples of music, art, and drama, Kelley Harness challenges the prevailing view that Florence saw a political and artistic decline during this period. She argues convincingly that the female domination of these years brought forth artistic patronage that was both continuous and well-conceived.
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cover of Echoes: A Dramatic Bagatelle

Echoes

A Dramatic Bagatelle

Emma Gad, Translated by Lynn R. Wilkinson

University of Wisconsin Press, 2021

Echoes: A Dramatic Bagatelle (Genklang. Dramatisk Bagatel) premiered at Folketeatret (the People’s Theater) in Copenhagen on September 15, 1888, and was the third play by the Danish writer and playwright Emma Gad (1852–1921) to be performed at theaters in Copenhagen.

Although it was labeled a “bagatelle,” Echoes, like most of Gad’s other plays, is quite funny. The play brings together three individuals in the out-of-the-way cottage of an old servant. Countess Clara takes refuge with Maren, her former nursemaid, during a sudden downpour and is soon joined by Niels, her former tutor, who claims to be passing by on his way to a church, where he hopes to find important historical documents. During Clara’s conversations with the two, it comes out that she is considering marriage to a count who lives nearby, even though she finds him and his way of life unattractive, and that she and Niels had been in love years before.

Gad’s graceful dialogue manages to touch on questions hotly debated in the last decades of the nineteenth century, such as the ability of individuals to break with the past or with outmoded or repressive conventions, while also making audiences laugh. Despite the play’s lighthearted wittiness, Echoes is an inventive example of turn-of-the-century avant-garde theater.
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cover of Economic Women: Essays on Desire and Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Economic Women

Essays on Desire and Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Edited by Lana L. Dalley and Jill Rappoport

The Ohio State University Press, 2013

Economic Women: Essays on Desire and Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century British Culture, edited by Lana L. Dalley and Jill Rappoport, showcases the wide-ranging economic activities and relationships of real and fictional women in nineteenth-century British culture. This volume’s essays chronicle the triumphs and setbacks of women who developed, described, contested, and exploited new approaches to economic thought and action. In their various roles as domestic employees, activists fighting for free trade, theorists developing statistical models, and individuals considering the cost of marriage and its dissolution, the women discussed here were givers and takers, producers and consumers.
Bringing together leading and emerging voices in the field, this collection builds on the wealth of interdisciplinary economic criticism published in the last twenty years, but it also challenges traditional understandings of economic subjectivity by emphasizing both private and public records and refusing to identify a single female corollary to Economic Man. The scholars presented here recover game-changing stories of women’s economic engagement from diaries, letters, ledgers, fiction, periodicals, and travel writing to reveal a nuanced portrait of Economic Women. Offering new readings of works by George Eliot, Bram Stoker, Willkie Collins, Charlotte Riddell, and Ellen Wood, and addressing political economy, consumerism, and business developments alongside the ethics of exchange and family finances, Economic Women tells a story of ambivalence as well as achievement, failure as well as forward motion.
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cover of Economies of Praise: Value, Labor, and Form in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry

Economies of Praise

Value, Labor, and Form in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry

Ryan Netzley

Northwestern University Press, 2024

Reevaluates early modern poems of praise as, paradoxically, challenging an artistic economy that values exchange and productivity
 
Early modern poems of praise typically insist that they do not have a purpose or enact real labor beyond their effortless listing of laudable qualities. And yet the poets discussed in this study, including Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, Anne Bradstreet, Lucy Hutchinson, and John Milton, hint at an alternative aesthetic economy at work in their verse. Poetic praise, it turns out, might show us a social world outside the organizing principle of exchange.
 
In Economies of Praise: Value, Labor, and Form in Seventeenth‑Century English Poetry, Ryan Netzley explores how poems of praise imagine alternatives to market and gift economies and point instead to a self-contained aesthetic economy that works against a more expansive and productivist understanding of literary art. By depicting exchange as inconsequential, unproductive, and redundant rather than a necessary constituent of social order, these poems model for modern readers a world without the imperative to create, appraise, and repeatedly demonstrate one’s own value.

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cover of Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire

Edge of Irony

Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire

Marjorie Perloff

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and multilingual world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For them, the trauma of World War I included the sudden loss of the geographical entity into which they had been born: in 1918, the empire was dissolved overnight, leaving Austria a small, fragile republic that would last only twenty years before being annexed by Hitler’s Third Reich. In this major reconsideration of European modernism, Marjorie Perloff identifies and explores the aesthetic world that emerged from the rubble of Vienna and other former Habsburg territories—an “Austro-Modernism” that produced a major body of drama, fiction, poetry, and autobiography.

Perloff explores works ranging from Karl Kraus’s drama The Last Days of Mankind and Elias Canetti’s memoir The Tongue Set Free to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notebooks and Paul Celan’s lyric poetry. Throughout, she shows that Austro-Modernist literature is characterized less by the formal and technical inventions of a modernism familiar to us in the work of  Joyce and Pound, Dada and Futurism, than by a radical irony beneath a seemingly conventional surface, an acute sense of exile, and a sensibility more erotic and quixotic than that of its German contemporaries. Skeptical and disillusioned, Austro-Modernism prefers to ask questions rather than formulate answers.
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cover of Edna O'Brien and the Art of Fiction

Edna O'Brien and the Art of Fiction

Maureen O'Connor

Bucknell University Press, 2022

Since the appearance of her first novel, The Country Girls, in 1960—a book that undermined the nation’s ideal of innocent and pious Irish girlhood­—Edna O’Brien has provoked controversy in her native Ireland and abroad. Indeed, several of her early novels were condemned by church authorities and banned by the Irish government for their frank portrayals of sexual matters and the inner lives of women. Now an internationally acclaimed writer, O’Brien must be critically reassessed for a twenty-first century audience. Edna O’Brien and the Art of Fiction provides an urgent retrospective consideration of one of the English-speaking world’s best-selling and most prolific contemporary authors. Drawing on O’Brien’s fiction as well as archival material, and applying new theoretical approaches—including ecocritical and feminist new materialist readings—this study considers the pioneering and enduring ways O’Brien represents women’s experience, family relationships, the natural world, sex, creativity, and death, and her work’s long anticipation of contemporary movements such as #metoo.
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cover of Educating English Daughters: Late Seventeenth-Century Debates

Educating English Daughters

Late Seventeenth-Century Debates

Bathsua Makin and Mary More

Iter Press, 2016

This edition offers texts from Bathsua Makin and Mary More, and Robert Whitehall’s response to More’s argument. Makin describes the appropriate education for London merchants’ daughters, arguing that girls should be educated and should aspire to follow learned women in history, and that educated women improve their families and themselves. More argues that women have the right to an education, and that such an education shows that the inequality of married women under English law is a man-made institution. More’s argument drew objections from her Oxford reader, Robert Whitehall, who preserved her manuscript with his own. Makin and More enjoyed a measure of public recognition and esteem, yet after their deaths, they and their texts were largely ignored until the late twentieth century.

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cover of Educating Seeta: The Anglo-Indian Family Romance and the Poetics of Indirect Rule

Educating Seeta

The Anglo-Indian Family Romance and the Poetics of Indirect Rule

Shuchi Kapila

The Ohio State University Press, 2010

Even though Edward Said’s Orientalism inspired several generations of scholars to study the English novel’s close involvement with colonialism, they have not considered how English novels themselves were radically altered by colonialism. In Educating Seeta, Shuchi Kapila argues that the paradoxes of indirect rule in British India were negotiated in “family romances” which encoded political struggle in the language of domestic and familial civility. A mixture of domestic ideology and liberal politics, these are Anglo-Indian romances, written by British colonials who lived in India during a period of indirect colonial rule. Instead of providing neat conclusions and smooth narratives, they become a record of the limits of liberal colonialism. They thus offer an important supplement to Victorian novels, extend the study of nineteenth-century domestic ideology, and offer a new perspective on colonial culture. Kapila demonstrates that popular writing about India and, by implication, other colonies is an important supplement to the high Victorian novel and indispensable to our understanding of nineteenth-century English literature and culture. Her nuanced study of British writing about indirect rule in India will reshape our understanding of Victorian domestic ideologies, class formation, and gender politics.
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cover of Educating Women: Cultural Conflict and Victorian Literature

Educating Women

Cultural Conflict and Victorian Literature

Laura Morgan Green

Ohio University Press, 2001

In 1837, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, no institution of higher education in Britain was open to women. By the end of the century, a quiet revolution had occurred: women had penetrated even the venerable walls of Oxford and Cambridge and could earn degrees at the many new universities founded during Victoria's reign. During the same period, novelists increasingly put intellectually ambitious heroines students, teachers, and frustrated scholars—at the center of their books. Educating Women analyzes the conflict between the higher education movement's emphasis on intellectual and professional achievement and the Victorian novel's continuing dedication to a narrative in which women's success is measured by the achievement of emotional rather than intellectual goals and by the forging of social rather than institutional ties.

Focusing on works by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Anna Leonowens, and Thomas Hardy, Laura Morgan Green demonstrates that those texts are shaped by the need to mediate the conflict between the professionalism and publicity increasingly associated with education, on the one hand, and the Victorian celebration of women as emblems of domesticity, on the other. Educating Women shows that the nineteenth-century “heroines” of both history and fiction were in fact as indebted to domestic ideology as they were eager to transform it.

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cover of Edward Lear's Nonsense Birds

Edward Lear's Nonsense Birds

Edward Lear

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2013

The Stripy Bird. The Scroobius Bird. The Obsequious Ornamental Ostrich who wore boots to keep his feet quite dry. Of all the animals that sprang from the idiosyncratic imagination of Edward Lear, few feature as frequently as birds, which appear throughout his work, from the flamboyant flock in the Nonsense Alphabet to the quirky avian characters of his limericks, stories, and songs. Lear drew himself as a bird on numerous occasions. In a popular self-portrait—later reproduced on a postage stamp—Lear even represented himself as a portly, bespectacled bird.

Edward Lear’s Nonsense Birds collects more than sixty of Lear’s bird illustrations from across his entire body of work. Often, the birds have hilariously human characteristics. There is, for instance, a Good-Natured Grey Gull, a Hasty Hen, and a Querulous Quail. The Judicious Jay is chiefly concerned with good grooming. The Vicious Vulture, meanwhile, turns out to be a wordsmith whose verses on vellum celebrate veal. Each bird is endowed with a unique personality, while collectively they form a wonderfully amusing flock. Also included are a series of twenty-four hand-colored illustrations.

Bright and beautifully illustrated, this book will make a perfect gift for children of all ages and will also be welcomed by all who love Lear’s work or are interested in learning more about his fascination with birds.
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cover of Effeminism: The Economy of Colonial Desire

Effeminism

The Economy of Colonial Desire

Revathi Krishnaswamy

University of Michigan Press, 2011

Effeminism charts the flows of colonial desire in the works of British writers in India. Working on the assumption that desire is intensely political, historically constituted, and materially determined, the book shows how the inscriptions of masculinity in the fictions of Flora Annie Steel, Rudyard Kipling, and E. M. Forster are deeply implicated in the politics of colonial rule and anticolonial resistance. At the same time, the study refrains from representing colonialism as a coherent set of public events, policies, and practices whose social, political, and cultural meanings are self-evident. Instead, by tracing the resistant and unassailable modes of masculine desire in colonial fiction, the study insists on an explosive revolutionary potential that makes desire often intractable. And by restoring the political in the unconscious and the unconscious in the political, the book proposes to understand colonialism in terms of historical failure, ideological inadequacy, and political contention. This book will interest not only scholars of 19th- and 20th-century British literature and colonial and postcolonial literatures, but also those working in the areas of cultural studies, gender studies, and South Asian studies.“Krishnaswamy uses ‘effeminization’ to describe the complicated paths of colonial sexual desire, stereotypes of Indian male passivity, and how ‘colonizing men used womanhood to delegitimize, discredit and disempower colonized men.’ Reading texts by Rudyard Kipling (a ‘culturally hybrid male’), E. M. Forster (a homosexual), and F. A. Steel (a woman), the author shows how these tactics affect the representation not only of colonized men and women but also of the marginalized writers of the colonizing culture. In the process, she makes intriguing analogies between androgyny and biculturalism.”—Choice
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cover of Effeminism: The Economy of Colonial Desire

Effeminism

The Economy of Colonial Desire

Revathi Krishnaswamy

University of Michigan Press, 1999

Effeminism charts the flows of colonial desire in the works of British writers in India. Working on the assumption that desire is intensely political, historically constituted, and materially determined, the book shows how the inscriptions of masculinity in the fictions of Flora Annie Steel, Rudyard Kipling, and E. M. Forster are deeply implicated in the politics of colonial rule and anticolonial resistance. At the same time, the study refrains from representing colonialism as a coherent set of public events, policies, and practices whose social, political, and cultural meanings are self-evident. Instead, by tracing the resistant and unassailable modes of masculine desire in colonial fiction, the study insists on an explosive revolutionary potential that makes desire often intractable. And by restoring the political in the unconscious and the unconscious in the political, the book proposes to understand colonialism in terms of historical failure, ideological inadequacy, and political contention. This book will interest not only scholars of 19th- and 20th-century British literature and colonial and postcolonial literatures, but also those working in the areas of cultural studies, gender studies, and South Asian studies.“Krishnaswamy uses ‘effeminization’ to describe the complicated paths of colonial sexual desire, stereotypes of Indian male passivity, and how ‘colonizing men used womanhood to delegitimize, discredit and disempower colonized men.’ Reading texts by Rudyard Kipling (a ‘culturally hybrid male’), E. M. Forster (a homosexual), and F. A. Steel (a woman), the author shows how these tactics affect the representation not only of colonized men and women but also of the marginalized writers of the colonizing culture. In the process, she makes intriguing analogies between androgyny and biculturalism.”—Choice
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cover of Eight Plays: Performance Texts

Eight Plays

Performance Texts

Arthur Schnitzler

Northwestern University Press, 2007

The plays of Arthur Schnitzler have in recent years come to be recognized as masterpieces of modernism. This collection presents the most accurate translations available of Schnitzler's works, passing up opportunities to paraphrase and instead flushing out vivid detail and psychological insight by combining a sensitive interpretation of the playwright's sometimes ironic, sometimes farcical, temperament with a faithful re-creation of dialogue.

The volume includes Schnitzler's popular Roundelay (La Ronde) and Anatol, as well as rarely translated works like Professor Bernhardi and Hour of Realizing. There are also additional scenes and an alternate ending to Anatol that are seldom found in translation or even in German versions of the play. With conscientious attention to the rhythms of speech and respect for the completeness of the works, these translations offer new possibilities for bringing Schnitzler's works to the contemporary stage and new insights for anyone interested in drama, literature, or history.
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cover of Eight Twentieth-Century Russian Plays

Eight Twentieth-Century Russian Plays

Timothy Langen and Justin Weir

Northwestern University Press, 2000

Russia produced more notable dramas in the twentieth century than at any other time in its history, yet many of the plays from this period have been only sporadically available in English, and others have never been translated before. For each of these eight works, Timothy Langen and Justin Weir provide an insightful introduction to the literary, cultural, and political contexts in which the plays first appeared, considering the influence that various literary movements had on the development of Russian drama and exploring the effect of the increasingly politicized climate of the new Soviet state.

Included in this volume:

Sacred Blood, by Zinaida Gippius; The Unknown Woman, by Alexander Blok; Vladimir Mayakovsky, by Vladimir Mayakosky; The Case of the Entry Room, by Victor Ardov; Squaring the Circle, by Valentin Kataev; Elizaveta Bam, by Daniil Kharms; Grain, by Vladimir Kirshon; and The Guests, by Leonid Zorin.
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cover of Eighteenth-Century Contexts: Historical Inquiries in Honor of Philip Harth

Eighteenth-Century Contexts

Historical Inquiries in Honor of Philip Harth

Howard D. Weinbrot

University of Wisconsin Press, 2001

Eighteenth-Century Contexts offers a lively array of essays that consider literary, intellectual, political, theological, and cultural aspects of the years 1650–1800, in the British Isles and Europe. At the center of the book is Jonathan Swift; several essays delve into his poetry, his similarities to Bernard Mandeville, his response to Anthony Collins’s Discourse of Free-Thinking, and the relationship between his Gulliver’s Travels and Thomas More’s Utopia. Other essays discuss Alexander Pope, eighteenth-century music and poetry, William Congreve, James Boswell, Samuel Richardson, and women’s novels of the eighteenth century.

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cover of El Conde don Pero Vélez y don Sancho el Deseado: Comedia en Tres Actos

El Conde don Pero Vélez y don Sancho el Deseado

Comedia en Tres Actos

Richard Olmsted

University of Minnesota Press, 1944

El Conde don Pero Vélez y don Sancho el Deseado translated by Richard Hubbell Olmsted was first published in 1944. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.This scholarly and critical edition of Vélez de Guevara’s comedy was first scheduled for publication as volume ten of the famous Spanish series of plays called “Teatro Antiguo,” edited by the Spanish scholar, Ramón Menédez Pidal. But during the Spanish Civil War the plates disappeared from the publishing house in Madrid. However, part of a set of page proofs had been forwarded to Dr. Olmsted for checking and it is from these page proofs, in part, that the type for this volume has been set. The remainder of the text has been taken from a careful transcription which Dr. Olmsted had made from the original manuscript in Madrid.Luis Vélez de Guevara, who died in 1644, was one of the most prolific authors of the Golden Age of Spanish drama, and El Conde don Pero Vélez y don Sancho el Deseado has most of the characteristics typical of its period – it shows the customs and standards of the time, abounds in puns and humor, and unfolds a central love plot. The play is centered around the familiar theme of the jealous zeal of a king to protect the honor of his sister. The story comes from the popular lore of the nation’s history and balladry, being one of the best examples of the drama derived directly from the romancero.An edition of El Conde don Pero Vélez y don Sancho el Deseado was printed in the 17th century, and one copy (apparently only one surviving) is in the possession of the University of California. Dr. Olmsted, in Chapter V, indicates many of the errors in that rare volume, and thus makes the present publication the only reliable edition in existence.
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cover of El Lissitzky on Paper: Print Culture, Architecture, Politics, 1919–1933

El Lissitzky on Paper

Print Culture, Architecture, Politics, 1919–1933

Samuel Johnson

University of Chicago Press, 2024

An examination of the importance of paper in the work of Soviet artist, designer, and architect El Lissitzky.
 
Russian artist El Lissitzky’s work spans painting, photography, theatrical and exhibition design, architecture, graphic design, typography, and literature. He was active in the Jewish cultural renaissance, formed an artists’ collective with Kazimir Malevich, was a key figure in the dissemination of early Soviet art in Western Europe, and designed propaganda for the Stalin regime. With such a varied history and body of work, scholars have often struggled to identify the core principles that tied his diverse oeuvre together.
 
In El Lissitzky on Paper, Samuel Johnson argues that Lissitzky’s commitment to creating works on paper is a constant that unites his endeavors. Paper played a key role in the utopian projects that informed Lissitzky’s work, and the artist held a commitment to print as the premier medium of immediate public exchange. Johnson analyzes and contextualizes this idea against the USSR’s strict management of this essential resource and the growth of new media communications, including the telephone, telegraph, and film.
 
With this book, Johnson presents a significant contribution to scholarship on this major artist, revealing new connections between Lissitzky’s work in architecture and visual art and bringing to light sources from largely unstudied Russian archives.
 
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cover of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The Origins of a New Poetry

Dorothy Mermin

University of Chicago Press, 1989

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) was the first major woman poet in the English literary tradition. Her significance has been obscured in this century by her erasure from most literary histories and her exclusion from academic anthologies. Dorothy Mermin's critical and biographical study argues for Barrett Browning's originative role in both the Victorian poetic tradition and the development of women's literature.

Barrett Browning's place at the wellhead of a new female tradition remains the single most important fact about her in terms of literary history, and it was central to her self-consciousness as a poet. Mermin's study shows that Barrett Browning's anomalous situation was constantly present to her imagination and that questions of gender shaped almost everything she wrote. Mermin argues that Barrett Browning's poetry covertly inspects and dismantles the barriers set in her path by gender and that in her major works—Sonnets from the Portuguese, Aurora Leigh, her best political poems, "A Musical Instrument"—difficulty is turned into triumph, incorporating the author's femininity, her situation as a woman poet, and her increasingly substantial fame.

Mermin skillfully interweaves biography and close readings of the poems to show precisely how Barrett Browning's life as a woman writer is a part of the essential meaning of her art. Both her personal and her literary achievements are exceptionally well documented, especially for her formative years. Mermin makes extensive use of the poet's early essays, a diary covering most of her twenty-sixth year, and the enormous number of letters that have survived. Ranging from her earliest ambitions through her long periods of discouragement and illness to her happy married life with Robert Browning, this comprehensive study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is essential reading for students of the Victorian period, English literature, and women's studies.
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cover of Elizabeth I: Translations, 1544-1589

Elizabeth I

Translations, 1544-1589

Elizabeth I

University of Chicago Press, 2008

England’s Virgin Queen, Elizabeth Tudor, had a reputation for proficiency in foreign languages, repeatedly demonstrated in multilingual exchanges with foreign emissaries at court and in the extemporized Latin she spoke on formal visits to Cambridge and Oxford. But the supreme proof of her mastery of other tongues is the sizable body of translations she made over the course of her lifetime. This two-volume set is the first complete collection of Elizabeth’s translations from and into Latin, French, and Italian.

Presenting original and modernized spellings in a facing-page format, these two volumes will answer the call to make all of Elizabeth’s writings available. They include her renderings of epistles of Cicero and Seneca, religious writings of John Calvin and Marguerite de Navarre, and Horace’s Ars poetica, as well as Elizabeth’s Latin Sententiae drawn from diverse sources, on the responsibilities of sovereign rule and her own perspectives on the monarchy.  Editors Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel offer introduction to each of the translated selections, describing the source text, its cultural significance, and the historical context in which Elizabeth translated it. Their annotations identify obscure meanings, biblical and classical references, and Elizabeth’s actual or apparent deviations from her sources.

The translations collected here trace Elizabeth’s steady progression from youthful evangelical piety to more mature reflections on morality, royal responsibility, public and private forms of grief, and the right way to rule.  Elizabeth I: Translations is the queen’s personal legacy, an example of the very best that a humanist education can bring to the conduct of sovereign rule.
[more]
cover of Elizabeth I: Translations, 1592-1598

Elizabeth I

Translations, 1592-1598

Elizabeth I

University of Chicago Press, 2009

England’s Virgin Queen, Elizabeth Tudor, had a reputation for proficiency in foreign languages, repeatedly demonstrated in multilingual exchanges with foreign emissaries at court and in the extemporized Latin she spoke on formal visits to Cambridge and Oxford. But the supreme proof of her mastery of other tongues is the sizable body of translations she made over the course of her lifetime. This two-volume set is the first complete collection of Elizabeth’s translations from and into Latin, French, and Italian.
            Presenting original and modernized spellings in a facing-page format, these two volumes will answer the call to make all of Elizabeth’s writings available. They include her renderings of epistles of Cicero and Seneca, religious writings of John Calvin and Marguerite de Navarre, and Horace’s Ars poetica, as well as Elizabeth’s Latin Sententiae drawn from diverse sources, on the responsibilities of sovereign rule and her own perspectives on the monarchy.  Editors Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel offer introduction to each of the translated selections, describing the source text, its cultural significance, and the historical context in which Elizabeth translated it. Their annotations identify obscure meanings, biblical and classical references, and Elizabeth’s actual or apparent deviations from her sources. 
            The translations collected here trace Elizabeth’s steady progression from youthful evangelical piety to more mature reflections on morality, royal responsibility, public and private forms of grief, and the right way to rule.  Elizabeth I: Translations is the queen’s personal legacy, an example of the very best that a humanist education can bring to the conduct of sovereign rule. 
 
 
[more]
cover of Elizabethan Poetry in Manuscript: An Edition of British Library Harley MS 7392(2)

Elizabethan Poetry in Manuscript

An Edition of British Library Harley MS 7392(2)

Edited by Jessica Edmondes

Iter Press, 2022

This volume presents the first printed edition of a late sixteenth-century poetic miscellany and provides invaluable insight into understanding the literature of the period. Its owner and principal scribe, Humfrey Coningsby, drew on texts circulating in manuscript , predominantly by contemporary writers of the time—including Philip Sidney, Edward Dyer, Arthur Gorges, Walter Ralegh, Elizabeth I, the Earl of Oxford, Nicholas Breton, George Peele, and Thomas Watson. Coningsby also added at least two of his own compositions, along with anonymous poems not found in any other manuscripts or printed books.

This edition preserves the appearance, spelling, and punctuation of the original manuscript while expanding antiquated contractions to provide an easily readable text. Textual notes appear on the page, and in-depth contextual notes and word glosses are provided in the commentary section. The analyses add to our knowledge of early modern manuscript culture and literary manuscript transmission, and a substantial introduction provides context for the compilation of the anthology.
[more]
cover of Emblemata Hispanica: An Annotated Bibliography of Spanish Emblem Literature to the Year 1700

Emblemata Hispanica

An Annotated Bibliography of Spanish Emblem Literature to the Year 1700

Pedro F. Campa

Duke University Press, 1990

Emblem books—books containing pictorial representations whose symbolic meaning is expressed in words—were produced in great quantities and in numerous languages during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Because literary critics and art historians increasingly recognize the importance of the emblem in Renaissance and Baroque studies, this book answers the need for a bibliography listing the locations of all known emblem books in Spanish, as well as those translated into Spanish, written by Spaniards in other languages, and polyglot editions that contain a Spanish text.
Covered in this bibliography are all emblem books published from the beginning to the end of the Spanish Golden Age, as well as a wide range of secondary sources on relevant subjects, among them mythography, paradoxography, numismatics, fetes, funerals, proverbs, apothegms, antiquarianism, collecting, and pertinent studies in art history and architecture. Providing call numbers for library locations, information on facsimile reprints, and microform editions, the work is extensively indexed—by date and place of publication, by printers and booksellers, by authors and artists, and by dedicatees, as well as by subject.
[more]
cover of Embodied Memory: Theatre Of George Tabon

Embodied Memory

Theatre Of George Tabon

Anat Feinberg

University of Iowa Press, 1999

Making use of invaluable archival material, Feinberg's biographical account is followed by a study of Tabori's experimental theatre work. As did prominent avant-gardists such as Grotowski or Chaikin, Tabori sought to open up new vistas in an otherwise mainstream theatre system. Feinberg pays special attention to Tabori's theatrical innovations, most movingly found in his Holocaust plays. There Feinberg shows the ways in which Tabori's theatre becomes a locus of remembrance (Gedächtnisort) and of unique, engaging memory-work (Erinnerungsarbeit).

[more]
cover of Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses

Embodied

Victorian Literature and the Senses

William A. Cohen

University of Minnesota Press, 2008

Making sense of the body in Victorian literature

What does it mean to be human? British writers in the Victorian period found a surprising answer to this question. What is human, they discovered, is nothing more or less than the human body itself. In literature of the period, as well as in scientific writing and journalism, the notion of an interior human essence came to be identified with the material existence of the body. The organs of sensory perception were understood as crucial routes of exchange between the interior and the external worlds.

Anatomizing Victorian ideas of the human, William A. Cohen considers the meaning of sensory encounters in works by writers including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Rather than regarding the bodily exterior as the primary location in which identity categories—such as gender, sexuality, race, and disability—are expressed, he focuses on the interior experience of sensation, whereby these politics come to be felt. In these elegant engagements with literary works, cultural history, and critical theory, Cohen advances a phenomenological approach to embodiment, proposing that we encounter the world not through our minds or souls but through our senses.
[more]
cover of Emergency Writing: Irish Literature, Neutrality, and the Second World War

Emergency Writing

Irish Literature, Neutrality, and the Second World War

Anna Teekell

Northwestern University Press, 2018

Taking seriously Ireland’s euphemism for World War II, “the Emergency,” Anna Teekell’s Emergency Writing asks both what happens to literature written during a state of emergency and what it means for writing to be a response to an emergency.
 
Anchored in close textual analysis of works by Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O’Brien, Louis MacNeice, Denis Devlin, and Patrick Kavanagh, and supported by archival material and historical research, Emergency Writing shows how Irish late modernism was a response to the sociopolitical conditions of a newly independent Irish Free State and to a fully emerged modernism in literature and art. What emerges in Irish writing in the wake of Independence, of the Gaelic Revival, of Yeats and of Joyce, is a body of work that invokes modernism as a set of discursive practices with which to counter the Free State’s political pieties.
 
Emergency Writing provides a new approach to literary modernism and to the literature of conflict, considering the ethical dilemma of performing neutrality—emotionally, politically, and rhetorically—in a world at war.

[more]
cover of Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason: The Transatlantic "Light of All Our Day"

Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason

The Transatlantic "Light of All Our Day"

Patrick J. Keane

University of Missouri Press, 2005

Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason is a comparative study in transatlantic Romanticism, focusing on Emerson’s part in the American dialogue with British Romanticism and, as filtered through Coleridge, German Idealist philosophy. The book’s guiding theme is the concept of intuitive Reason, which Emerson derived from Coleridge’s distinction between Understanding and Reason and which Emerson associated with that “light of all our day” in his favorite stanza of Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” Intuitive Reason became the intellectual and emotional foundation of American Transcendentalism. That light radiated out to illuminate Emerson’s life and work, as well as the complex and often covert relationship of a writer who, however fiercely “self-reliant” and “original,” was deeply indebted to his transatlantic precursors.
            The debt is intellectual and personal. Emerson’s supposed indifference to, or triumph over, repeated familial tragedy is often attributed to his Idealism—a complacent optimism that blinded him to any vision of the tragic. His “art of losing” may be better understood as a tribute to the “healing power,” the consolation in distress, which Emerson considered Wordsworth’s principal value. The second part of this book traces Emerson’s struggle—with the help of the “benignant influence” shed by that “light of all our day”—to confront and overcome personal tragedy, to attain the equilibrium epitomized in Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas”: “Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.”
            As a study in what has been called “the paradox of originality,” the book should appeal to those interested in the Anglo-American Romantic tradition and the innovations of the individual talent—especially in the capacity of a writer such as Emerson not only to absorb his precursors but also to use them as a stimulus to his own creative power.
[more]
cover of Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling

Emotion in the Tudor Court

Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling

Bradley J. Irish

Northwestern University Press, 2018

Deploying literary analysis, theories of emotion from the sciences and humanities, and an archival account of Tudor history, Emotion in the Tudor Court examines how literature both reflects and constructs the emotional dynamics of life in the Renaissance court. In it, Bradley J. Irish argues that emotionality is a foundational framework through which historical subjects embody and engage their world, and thus can serve as a fundamental lens of social and textual analysis.

Spanning the sixteenth century, Emotion in the Tudor Court explores Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and Henrician satire; Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and elegy; Sir Philip Sidney and Elizabethan pageantry; and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and factional literature. It demonstrates how the dynamics of disgust,envy, rejection, and dread, as they are understood in the modern affective sciences, can be seen to guide literary production in the early modern court.

By combining Renaissance concepts of emotion with modern research in the social and natural sciences, Emotion in the Tudor Court takes a transdisciplinary approach to yield fascinating and robust ways to illuminate both literary studies and cultural history. 
[more]
cover of Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest

Empire Islands

Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest

Rebecca Weaver-Hightower

University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Through a detailed unpacking of the castaway genre’s appeal in English literature, Empire Islands forwards our understanding of the sociopsychology of British Empire. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower argues convincingly that by helping generations of readers to make sense of—and perhaps feel better about—imperial aggression, the castaway story in effect enabled the expansion and maintenance of European empire.Empire Islands asks why so many colonial authors chose islands as the setting for their stories of imperial adventure and why so many postcolonial writers “write back” to those island castaway narratives. Drawing on insightful readings of works from Thomas More’s Utopia to Caribbean novels like George Lamming’s Water with Berries, from canonical works such as Robinson Crusoe and The Tempest to the lesser-known A Narrative of the Life and Astonishing Adventures of John Daniel by Ralph Morris, Weaver-Hightower examines themes of cannibalism, piracy, monstrosity, imperial aggression, and the concept of going native. Ending with analysis of contemporary film and the role of the United States in global neoimperialism, Weaver-Hightower exposes how island narratives continue not only to describe but to justify colonialism.Rebecca Weaver-Hightower is assistant professor of English and postcolonial studies at the University of North Dakota.
[more]
cover of Empire's Companion: Virgilian Epics from Colonial Iberoamerica

Empire's Companion

Virgilian Epics from Colonial Iberoamerica

Erika Valdivieso

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A study of how Latin poetry shaped colonial aspirations in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century South and Central America.
 
Accompanying Iberian colonizers to the Americas, Virgil’s Aeneid inspired generations of colonial elites to write their own epic poems in Latin—priming imaginations for Spanish and Portuguese rule in the Americas. In Empire’s Companion, Erika Valdivieso recovers this lost strain of poetry for classicists and early Americanists alike. Each chapter introduces readers to a new poem that adapts Virgil for a different geographic context. These epics, Valdivieso argues, show elites working to reshape the New World in their own image, drawing on Virgil to think about the conquest of Indigenous peoples, to form new ideas about the globe, and to consider the shifting power dynamics between America and Europe. A powerful corrective to prevailing ideas about the reception of Virgil in the Americas, Empire’s Companion reveals the imperial potential of the Aeneid in the hands of governing elites.

[more]
cover of Empowering Women Executives: Presidents and Prime Ministers in Central and Eastern Europe

Empowering Women Executives

Presidents and Prime Ministers in Central and Eastern Europe

Farida Jalalzai and Meg Rincker

Temple University Press, 2027

What role does gender play as women pursue government positions, gain office, and govern countries in Central and Eastern Europe? In Empowering Women Executives, Farida Jalalzai and Meg Rincker examine women’s paths to and influence at the executive level, focusing specifically on Croatia, Poland, Slovakia, Estonia, and Romania.

The authors interview President Kersti Kaljulaid of Estonia, Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor of Croatia, Prime Minister Iveta Radičová of Slovakia, and Prime Minister Viorica Dăncilă of Romania as well as dozens of political experts and insiders to provide an in-depth look at female executives’ power in office. The authors also show the impact these leaders had in a region where traditional gender roles expanded only after the fall of Communism.

Each case study describes the historical context in which a woman emerges as a candidate, her ability to shape legislation, and how the media portrays her gender in analyzing her leadership. The authors also consider how gender influences a female executive’s leadership style or policy priorities—from appointing women to government positions and support for policies benefitting women to being a role model.
Empowering Women Executives illuminates women’s political inclusion in an area of the world where women have gained significant political agency. 

[more]
cover of Enchanted Islands: Picturing the Allure of Conquest in Eighteenth-Century France

Enchanted Islands

Picturing the Allure of Conquest in Eighteenth-Century France

Mary D. Sheriff

University of Chicago Press, 2018

In Enchanted Islands, renowned art historian Mary D. Sheriff explores the legendary, fictional, and real islands that filled the French imagination during the ancien regime as they appeared in royal ballets and festivals, epic literature, paintings, engravings, book illustrations, and other objects. Some of the islands were mythical and found in the most popular literary texts of the day—islands featured prominently, for instance, in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso,Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, and Fénelon’s, Telemachus. Other islands—real ones, such as Tahiti and St. Domingue—the French learned about from the writings of travelers and colonists. All of them were imagined to be the home of enchantresses who used magic to conquer heroes by promising sensual and sexual pleasure. As Sheriff shows, the theme of the enchanted island was put to many uses. Kings deployed enchanted-island mythology to strengthen monarchical authority, as Louis XIV did in his famous Versailles festival Les Plaisirs de l’île enchantée. Writers such as Fénelon used it to tell morality tales that taught virtue, duty, and the need for male strength to triumph over female weakness and seduction. Yet at the same time, artists like Boucher painted enchanted islands to portray art’s purpose as the giving of pleasure. In all these ways and more, Sheriff demonstrates for the first time the centrality of enchanted islands to ancient regime culture in a book that will enchant all readers interested in the art, literature, and history of the time.
[more]
cover of Enchanted Wood: Engraving a Place for Women Artists in Rural Britain

Enchanted Wood

Engraving a Place for Women Artists in Rural Britain

Kristin Bluemel

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

How women wood engravers helped reshape the visual and literary landscape of modern Britain

Amid the austerities of Depression-era publishing in Britain, urban editors and women artists recognized a unique opportunity to make and sell popular books illustrated with wood engravings. Enchanted Wood focuses on four of these artists—Gwen Raverat, Agnes Miller Parker, Clare Leighton, and Joan Hassall—weaving together their lives and work to tell a compelling and little-known story about a modern art that transformed the lives of both urban and rural women.

In this richly illustrated book, Kristin Bluemel demonstrates how women engravers used wood engraving to redraw professional and personal boundaries for themselves and other women. Depicting realistic scenes of country life, these illustrations are reminiscent of the aesthetic of eighteenth-century artist, naturalist, and print innovator Thomas Bewick even as they present distinctly modern reflections on gender, age, marriage, and motherhood. Reproducing and analyzing white-line engravings, pen and ink drawings, and rare color engravings from these four artists’ books for children and adults, Enchanted Wood reveals the magnified power and meaning of gentle arts for everyday people and for national patterns of work and play.

Integrating vignettes from Bewick’s natural history with formal, thematic, and cultural analysis of the women’s art as she recovers their medium, oeuvres, and stories, Bluemel shows how wood engraving led Raverat, Miller Parker, Leighton, and Hassall to achieve professional stature, public affirmation, and personal independence. A visually rich history of collective achievement, Enchanted Wood establishes these women engravers as important modern artists and literary figures in their own right.

 

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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cover of End of the World: Poetry and Prose

End of the World

Poetry and Prose

Ivan M. Jirous

Karolinum Press, 2020

Sometimes called the Czech Bukowski, and more widely known by the epithet “Magor” (which translates roughly to “fool” or “madman”), Ivan Jirous was one of the most significant figures in the Czechoslovak cultural underground of the 1960s through the '80s.  Although trained as an art historian and famed for his poetry, Jirous was convinced that it was actually rock and roll music that held the greatest potential to enact change under the repressive regime of communist Czechoslovakia. He designated himself as the artistic director of the dissident rock band The Plastic People of the Universe, legendary for psychedelic music that was heavily influenced by nonconformist Western acts like Frank Zappa and The Velvet Underground. Alongside other figures from the musical underground, Jirous was arrested in 1976—the second of five prison sentences he would serve for his dissent—which helped bring about the landmark civil rights initiative known as Charter 77. In the wake of 1989’s Velvet Revolution, Váсlav Havel—the first president of the Czech Republic—was to say that Jirous and his unwavering commitment to liberation played “no small part” in casting off the yoke of Soviet oppression.

End of the World is the first major collection in English of the works of this legendary Czech “madman.” Although nicknamed for his aggressive and rebellious behavior, Jirous’s writing reveal a refined, sophisticated, and even tender sensibility. Translated in part by Paul Wilson, an original member of the Plastic People, the book gathers his poems and letters from prison, as well as his book-length prose work, The True Story of the Plastic People, alongside critical essays on Jirous’s life and work. End of the World is an ideal introduction to the raucous writer who playwright Tom Stoppard referred to as one of the most interesting personalities in modern Czech history.
 
[more]
cover of Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Grand Style

Endquote

Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Grand Style

Marina Balina, Nancy Condee, and Evgeny Dobrenko

Northwestern University Press, 1999

Sots-art, the mock use of the Soviet ideological clichés of mass culture, originated in Soviet nonconformist art of the early 1970s. An original and provocative guide, Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Grand Style examines the conceptual aspect of sots-art, sots-art poetry, and sots-art prose, and discusses where these still-vital intellectual currents may lead.
[more]
cover of Enemies of Promise

Enemies of Promise

Cyril Connolly

University of Chicago Press, 2008


“Whom the gods wish to destroy,” writes Cyril Connolly, “they first call promising.” First published in 1938 and long out of print, Enemies of Promise, an “inquiry into the problem of how to write a book that lasts ten years,” tests the boundaries of criticism, journalism, and autobiography with the blistering prose that became Connolly’s trademark. Connolly here confronts the evils of domesticity, politics, drink, and advertising as well as novelists such as Joyce, Proust, Hemingway, and Faulkner in essays that remain fresh and penetrating to this day.
 
 “A fine critic, compulsive traveler, and candid autobiographer. . . . [Connolly] lays down the law for all writers who wanted to count. . . . He had imagination and decisive images flashed with the speed of wit in his mind.”—V. S. Pritchett, New York Review of Books
 
“Anyone who writes, or wants to write, will find something on just about every single page that either endorses a long-held prejudice or outrages, and that makes it a pretty compelling read. . . . You end up muttering back at just about every ornately constructed pensée that Connolly utters, but that’s one of the joys of this book.”—Nick Hornby, The Believer
 
“A remarkable book.”—Anthony Powell
 

 
[more]
cover of Enemy Within: Culture Wars and Political Identity in Novels of the French Third Republic

Enemy Within

Culture Wars and Political Identity in Novels of the French Third Republic

Gilbert D. Chaitin

The Ohio State University Press, 2008

            In The Enemy Within, Gilbert D. Chaitin deepens our understanding of the nature and sources of culture wars during the French Third Republic. The psychological trauma caused by the Ferry educational reform laws of 1880-1882, which strove to create a new national identity based on secular morality rather than God-given commandments, pitted Catholics against proponents of lay education and gave rise to novels by Bourget, Barrès, A. France, and Zola.
            By deploying Lacanian concepts to understand the “erotics of politics” revealed in these novels, Chaitin examines the formation of national identity, offering a new intellectual history of the period and shedding light on the intimate relations among literature, education, philosophy, morality, and political order. The mechanisms described in The Enemy Within provide fresh insight into the affective structure of culture wars not only in the French Third Republic but elsewhere in the world today.
           
[more]
cover of Engagement, Enlargement, and Confrontation: A Political History of the European Union’s Eastern Policies after the Cold War

Engagement, Enlargement, and Confrontation

A Political History of the European Union’s Eastern Policies after the Cold War

Graham Timmins

Central European University Press, 0

Engagement, Enlargement, and Confrontation provides a holistic view of the European Union’s eastern relations explored in an historical context following the end of the Cold War. The author draws out the key achievements and failures of this strategic exercise.

The focus is on the institutional adaptation of the European Union as well as on the dynamics of its policies towards the East. Graham Timmins identifies four interconnected factors which have shaped the development of the EU’s policies towards its eastern neighbours; the projection of the EU’s identity as an agent of peace and stability, the maintenance of internal stability within the Union, the coordination of Member State foreign policies, and the EU’s relations with Russia.

The book explores the key challenges faced by the European Union in terms of the EU’s eastern policies. These include capacity building, the management of expectations in the eastern neighbourhood, the reconciliation of national perspectives and agendas with wider EU strategic thinking, and last but not least the handling of the relationship with Russia. The general conclusion of the study is that the EU’s internal development in respect to its relationship with its eastern members and neighbours is likely to remain complex and unpredictable.

[more]
cover of Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History

Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History

Luisa Elena Delgado

Vanderbilt University Press, 2016

Rather than being properties of the individual self, emotions are socially produced and deployed in specific cultural contexts, as this collection documents with unusual richness. All the essays show emotions to be a form of thought and knowledge, and a major component of social life—including in the nineteenth century, which attempted to relegate them to a feminine intimate sphere.

The collection ranges across topics such as eighteenth-century sensibility, nineteenth-century concerns with the transmission of emotions, early twentieth-century cinematic affect, and the contemporary mobilization of political emotions including those regarding nonstate national identities. The complexities and effects of emotions are explored in a variety of forms—political rhetoric, literature, personal letters, medical writing, cinema, graphic art, soap opera, journalism, popular music, digital media—with attention paid to broader European and transatlantic implications.
[more]
cover of England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism

England in 1819

The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism

James Chandler

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Many of the writers from 1819, argues James Chandler, were acutely aware not only of their writing's place in history, but also of its place as history—a realization of a literary "spirit of the age" that resonates strongly with the current "return to history" in literary studies. Chandler explores the ties between Romantic and contemporary historicism and offers a series of cases of his own built around key texts from 1819.

"1819? At first sight, it might not seem a 'hot date'; but as James Chandler argues in his powerful book, it would be a mistake to overlook a year of such exceptional political conflagration and literary pyrotechnics in British history. Chandler's study is a wide-ranging, enormously ambitious, densely packed, closely argued work."—John Brewer, New Republic

"The book's largest argument, and the source of its considerable revelations, is that late twentieth-century practices of cultural history-writing have their roots in the peculiar Romantic historicism born in post-Waterloo Britain."—Jon Klancher, Times Literary Supplement

"A monumental work of scholarship."—Terry Eagleton, The Independent

[more]
cover of England's Asian Renaissance

England's Asian Renaissance

Su Fang Ng

University of Delaware Press, 2022

England's Asian Renaissance explores how Asian knowledges, narratives, and customs inflected early modern English literature. Just as Asian imports changed England's tastes and enriched the English language, Eastern themes, characters, and motifs helped shape the country's culture and contributed to its national identity. Questioning long-standing dichotomies between East and West and embracing a capacious understanding of translatio as geographic movement, linquistic transformation, and cultural grafting, the collection gives pride of place to convergence, approximation, and hybridity, thus underscoring the radical mobility of early modern culture. In so doing, England's Asian Renaissance also moves away from entrenched narratives of Western cultural sovereignty to think anew England's debts to Asia.

Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
[more]
cover of English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800

English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800

Heather Ladd

University of Delaware Press, 2022

The essays in English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800 explore the theatrical anecdote’s role in the construction of stage fame in England’s emergent celebrity culture during the long eighteenth century, as well as the challenges of employing such anecdotes in theatre scholarship today. This collection showcases scholarship that complicates the theatrical anecdote and shows its many sides and applications beyond the expected comic punch. Discussing anecdotal narratives about theatre people as producing, maintaining, and sometimes toppling individual fame, this book crucially investigates a key mechanism of celebrity in the long eighteenth century that reaches into the nineteenth century and beyond. The anecdote erases boundaries between public and private and fictionalizing the individual in ways deeply familiar to twenty-first century celebrity culture.
[more]
cover of English Women Staging Islam, 1696-1707

English Women Staging Islam, 1696-1707

Delarivier Manley and Mary Pix

Iter Press, 2012

Delarivier Manley and Mary Pix were among the groundbreaking “female wits,” who debuted their original plays for the public stage in 1695–96. Two of these plays contain explicitly Islamicate themes. Manley’s The Royal Mischief expands on The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia(1686), and Pix’s Ibrahim draws on Rycaut’s History of the Turkish Empire (1687). Continuing this interest, Manley’s Almyna (1706–7) responds to the newly translated Arabian Nights Entertainments (1704–17), and Pix’s The Conquest of Spain (1705) engages the history of Islamic Spain recounted in The Life of the Most Illustrious Monarch Almanzor (1693). These plays have been modernized and annotated in this edition, most for the first time. This edition also includes appendices with excerpts from historical sources and a select bibliography.
[more]
cover of Engraven Desire: Eros, Image, and Text in the French Eighteenth Century

Engraven Desire

Eros, Image, and Text in the French Eighteenth Century

Philip Stewart

Duke University Press, 1992

How do literary illustrations affect the way we read—or more subtly, what we read? Through a critical investigation of the role of engraving played in eighteenth-century French literature, Philip Stewart grapples with this question. In both its approach and its conclusions, his project marks a provocative departure from the tradition of viewing illustrations as merely pictures, rather than as texts to be interpreted themselves.
Focusing on the objectification of women by the “male gaze,” Stewart analyzes the varous ways in which this masculine power is simultaneously represented and veiled: the fascination with women playing “male” roles, such as soldiers; the preponderance of voyeuristic images of the naked female body; the transformation of male power into hostile forces of nature that render women helpless. Further, Stewart shows how “indecent” engravings that purported to test the limits of eighteenth-century morality often merely reinforced prevailing images of women.
Addressing critical concerns about the societal enforcement of gender roles in literature along with essential questions about the function of illustration, Engraven Desire provides surprising insight into the culturally conditioned act of reading. Stewart’s work, itself richly illustrated with hundreds of arresting reproductions, makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the interplay of art, literature, and society.
[more]
cover of Engraving Between Iconoclasm and Revolt: Art History and the Printed Image in Early Modern Europe

Engraving Between Iconoclasm and Revolt

Art History and the Printed Image in Early Modern Europe

Edward H. Wouk

University of Chicago Press, 0

An alternative history of Renaissance art from a Netherlandish perspective and focusing on printed images.

Through his treatises, letters, and support of printmaking projects, Bruges-born humanist Dominicus Lampsonius (1532–1599) tested the limits of what it meant to be an artist in the early modern period. This book—the first monographic study of Lampsonius to appear in the English language—investigates the convergence of art history, aesthetics, cultural politics, and theology in Lampsonius’s writings, with a particular focus on his novel theory of the printed image as a work of art.

In Lampsonius’s art history, painting recedes and engraving comes to the fore. This inversion of traditional hierarchies entailed a remaking of the Renaissance image as a graphic and replicable phenomenon. Here was a new way of looking at the image: not as a painted likeness of the sacred or the world, but rather as a graphic representation formed from the attenuated patterns of the engraved surface. In both meaning and making, printed images deflected the threats of iconoclasm precisely because, as manufactured objects, they could never be confused for what they represented—the sacred “prototype” they explicitly did not resemble. Tracing Lampsonius’s evolving views against the religious, political, and cultural upheaval of the Dutch Revolt, Edward H. Wouk considers the lasting implications of his efforts to change the course of art history.

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cover of Enigmas of Sacrifice: A Critique of Joseph M. Plunkett and the Dublin Insurrection of 1916

Enigmas of Sacrifice

A Critique of Joseph M. Plunkett and the Dublin Insurrection of 1916

W. J. Mc Cormack

Michigan State University Press, 2016

Enigmas of Sacrifice: A Critique of Joseph M. Plunkett and the Dublin Insurrection of 1916 is the first critical study of the religious poet and militarist Joseph M. Plunkett, who was executed with the other leaders of the Dublin insurrection of 1916. Through Plunkett the author gains access to areas of nationalist thought that were more often assumed or repressed than publicly formulated. In this eye-opening book, W. J. Mc Cormack explores and analyzes Plunkett’s brief life, work, and influence, beginning with his wealthy but dysfunctional family, irregular Jesuit education, and self-canceling sexuality. Mc Cormack continues through Plunkett’s active phase when amateur theatricals and a magazine editorship brought him into the emergent neonationalist discourse of early twentieth-century Ireland. Finally, the author arrives at Holy Week 1916, when Plunkett masterminded the forgery of official documentation in order to provoke and justify the insurrection he planned. Mc Cormack analyzes Plunkett’s significant texts and provides context through critical perspectives on his milieu. Enigmas of Sacrifice is unique in its effort to understand a major figure of Irish nationalism in terms that reach beyond political identity.
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